Iron Fic: The Mirror of Erised
by The Chairman
Summary: Contestants were given 24 hours to write 1500 words using the Mirror of Erised as the secret ingredient.
1. Untitled

Because Father is always right, Luna is neither frightened nor surprised when the corridor wall pulses warm against her back. The two sixth-years, a knot of wild-flying fists, grunts, and elbows, crash to the floor in front of her, but Luna just steps over their flailing feet, her fingers still tracing, gentle, curious, along the veins of mortar. Professor McGonagall rounds the corner, lips thin, wand raised, and Luna flattens her palm to the humming stone, a promise to return, before she is forced to move along with everyone else.

"It is a sort of creature you shall live inside, so be aware," Father had said, drawing her to him one last time on the platform. "Remember, life breathes all around. The tips of your fingers can tell you more than any old professor's lectures."

At first, it's disappointing to find her fellow Ravenclaws aren't at all curious about the warmth of the wall in the seventh-floor corridor. Her dorm-mates, it seems, are a bit disappointing in shoot odd looks at her necklace, even after she's explained about the Nargles, even after she's offered up the vanilla-sweet caps for them to smell. Luna feels sorry for these children with no sense of their five senses- their sleepy eyes only ever focused on what's right in front of their faces, their mouths only ever tasting what their toddler tongues told them they liked. She lies awake at night and wonders how they sleep so soundly within these crisp white sheets, how they can possibly prefer silence to the night sounds outside. She thinks of home, and Father, and the soft rustle of the Dirigible Plum bush under her window. She goes alone to the seventh-floor corridor, day after day, weeks on end, the warmth of the wall her own private puzzle.

Her fingertips grow callused and her robes are loose from skipped lunches before the stones finally give her the door. She doesn't ponder too much on whether she should walk through it, or not. One observable behaviour of Hogwarts: It will alter one's intended path, but the new journey often holds more instruction than one could find in a dozen text-books. The building is an old and wise organism, built to teach, and Luna trusts that it will not lead her to harm. Or, rather, no lasting harm, at least.

Proof is that the room behind the door is filled with wonderful things, broken, discarded, and dusty. She walks amongst the stacks, not daring to touch, now, because, though it is still Hogwarts, this is a precarious place, the magical and the mundane obviously having been piled together by all-too-human hands. Still, there is something here that she needs to find, and she is debating the wisdom of reaching for a tall wire cage resting atop a doorless wardrobe when she catches the glint of colour from the corner of her eye.

She pushes back the singed tapestry hiding the blue, then slowly sinks to her knees. Reflected back is herself, her body dressed in butter yellow pyjamas, sitting cross-legged in the cool ocean colours of her own bedroom. Her paints are spread beside her on the floor, and her father sits on her bed, smiling proud over the sun-swirled top of the three-legged table she'd left half painted in September. Only, in the mirror, the table is finished. Perfectly lines are much finer, and the pigments are brighter than anything Luna's ever managed mix on her own, and the oranges and yellows swirl just how she's always wanted to charm them to swirl. Father bends to kiss her forehead, carries the table away, and then Mirror Luna is navigating her necklace over her hair, hanging it on the bedpost, crawling between her own soft, worn sheets, and laying her head on her pillow.

No doubt, this is the thing she was asking for. The thing she was meant to find. She takes a deep breath of vanilla-sweet, settles against the stone floor to watch the shifting of her curtains in the night breeze.

…...

She picks the Bald Heads on her way back from visiting the Thestrals in the forest. Five she will owl to Father, the last she shall keep to herself. The whole school has been buzzing for weeks about the tournament, and the Champions, and "that cheat, Harry Potter", and the constant noise feels like lake mud sloshing in Luna's head. It's been almost two years, but tonight she will find the warm spot in the wall, again. She will sit alone in the peace and quiet, just herself, her Bald Head, and Herself in the Mirror.

The dried mushroom doesn't go down easily, and Luna wishes she were a little further along magically so she could conjure a glass to hold water. She settles for attempting to shoot a spray directly into her mouth, which proves messy and rather unsatisfying, but soon her dripping hair and dry throat don't matter at all, because the land inside the mirror has opened up wide and water, or indeed any other earthly element, is the last thing on her mind.

Behind her, across the expanse of green and blue, the creatures lumber, fly, hop, crawl. All the unfound things her father talks about: The Snorkack, the Moon Frogs, the Heliopaths, the Blibbering Humdingers. Every elegant and awkward form. Their eyes peer over her shoulder, their claws tangle in her hair, their teeth nibble at her bare and wiggling are everything she's ever imagined. Every flank of flesh, every wing, and horn, and scale, and beak she's ever drawn or painted, only so much more because these things are sentient, alive, breath-ruffling-her-robes-real in time and space.

These things, they are True Things.

The sky in the mirror swirls golden bright. She smiles as the menagerie nudge their faces into her hands.

….

It's been ages, but tonight, she's finally able to find the warm spot on the wall.

It's not her private puzzle, anymore. Every member of the D.A. and the Inquisitorial Squad could get into her room if they knew the right way to ask. And the wall has been cold every time she's come to the seventh-floor this year, so Luna suspects that someone has long known exactly what to say.

She doesn't really want to be here, alone again, doing three passes in her bare feet on the cold stone floor. But these last few weeks, her mind has become disarrayed, her restlessness grown out of all proportion, and she craves the clarity of the images in the mirror- the cool blue of her bedroom, the creatures that come out to play. She hopes for these things, even as she acknowledges their unlikelihood. She wonders what the mirror will do with the notion that tonight, more than anything, Luna desires to know the desire of her own heart.

She finds the candle stub she'd once hidden in the drawer of an old desk near the door, lights it with her wand. then pads down the stacks, pyjamas shifting loosely around her heels. Blue pyjamas, now, the butter yellow long outgrown. The room seems different, somehow. Used. Lived in. Not quite as much her's as it is someone else's.

As she walks down the aisles, it feels like mourning. It feels like Hogwarts, the living thing, might have stopped breathing.

When she's finished here tonight, she will not come again.

The tapestry, she is glad to see, remains undisturbed, the singed edge draped exactly how she left it. She pushes it off to the side, then sits cross-legged on the floor, like always, and waits.

She stares into the reflection of her own eyes, the flicker of the candle illuminating the grey to dirty yellow. Behind her, a figure walks out of the dark. Luna closes her eyes, turns away, gives the figure time to settle in next to her in her mind, knowing now without a doubt what she'll see when she turns back to the mirror.

In the dark, Ginny's hair falls rose petal red over Luna's shoulder. Their intertwined fingers rest in a bright spear of light on Luna's knee.

It tugs at her heart, her fingers nestled sweetly between the ridges of slim tendon and bone. It feels both right and wrong to have the image present itself so. Right in that, now she sees it, she can't deny it, and wrong because it is covetous and invasive. She has no right to bring Ginny into the mirror. No right to imagine the skin on the back of her hand, its texture and temperature under her fingertips..

And so this is it. The reason nothing feels quite whole anymore. Luna stands, leaves her Ginny looking up at her from the floor, then pulls the tapestry over the mirror, lifts the candle from the floor, extinguishes the light.


	2. Darkly

Darkly

April, 2022

Our discomfort with questions regarding Our Future Plans, of course, never came from a vacuum. And it's not that we don't appreciate being asked, rather that that line of questioning has gone on so long that it's become tedious and more than a bit cliché. It was two months before OWLs, and as every year of Hogwarts students has for at least 1000, we were being unceremoniously shuffled along into the business end of our scholastic careers. It was no longer good enough simply to know which end of the wand to hold, all of a sudden, we were being asked what we'd like to do with it.

"Well, we all know which end of the wand Albus holds on to," Scorpius laughed. "Whether he's ever going to do anything with it again, is, on the other hand, up for debate."

Rose rubbed the bridge of her nose and mouthed "Too Soon!" over my shoulder. At least that's what I imagine happened. It had been only two months since I received that frightfully tacky "Dear Albus" letter from that Irish girl, and while the wounds had certainly healed, they were nowhere near scarred over. Scorpius, to his credit, blanched rather immediately and begged my forgiveness.

"Quite alright, love," I say. "It's certainly been long enough at this point for me to take a bit of ribbing over it. Besides, if I go on moaning about what's-her-name any longer, you're going to have to put me in a black frock and a veil."

"That might be worth it, darling," Rose answered. "As long as you don't go overboard. There's a difference between a soulful, melancholy affectation and looking like your middle name's sake."

"So you're saying the veil might just be one too many?"

"Without question, love," Scorpius replied. "Besides, it would hide that beautiful eyeliner work you do."

"Excellent point. Now, we've got this horrid Career Thing to attend to, darlings. We should obviously attend, but how shall we get around having to actually talk about careers. Unless – do either of you actually know of a career that would interest you?"

"Well, I'd say Head Auror," Rose said, "But Albus certainly has us beat to it." Scorpius got a chuckle out of that. I was much of the way replying to her cheek with a two-fingered salute before …"

"The most amazing thing about you, dear cousin, is that you're at your smartest when you're trying to be an ass."

"I was not-"

"Oh just hush. We'll take a page from First year. I'll walk up there with all the sincerity I can feign –"

"Not much!" Scorpius coughed.

"All the sincerity I can feign," I repeated, "and tell them I'm interested in the Auror Corps. Rose, perhaps you could help me make sure my hair won't stay down?"

"Only if you can transfigure me a reasonable replica of a S.P.E.W. badge, love."

"All well and good for you two," Scorpius interjected, "but what am I supposed to say; 'Is there any room left in the pureblood supremacist terror squad course?' Perhaps I could borrow your eyeliner to draw a dark mark on my forearm?"

"Your father may well have been best known for being a Death Eater during the war, my darling," Rose answered. "But these days he's known for his charitable work. Perhaps you could slick your hair down, look suitable contrite for the sins of your forefathers, and tell them you'd like to help manage your family's philanthropic endeavours. That's probably not so far off from what you'll wind up doing anyway, so the Masters will probably not think you're having a go, unlike with us."

"Perhaps I should go first then," Scorpius said, and we spent the next half-hour finalizing our strategies – after they talked me out of nicking James's Gryffindor tie.

Shortly after breakfast that Saturday morning, the entire fifth-year class were brought into a room on the seventh floor. Now, one would think that with the sheer volume of Second War stories Rose and I had been subjected to over the years, we would know where we had been taken. Alas, we'd become so good at distancing ourselves from such things that we'd not recognised the Room of Requirement at all. The room was sparsely populated, with one chair per student behind rows of desks, a seat for Uncle Neville, and a door behind him.

"Good morning, Fifth Years," Uncle Neville began. "A school that has lasted as long as Hogwarts isn't going to be shy on its traditions. Unfortunately, with generation on generation of witches and wizards experiencing the same traditions, it's difficult to keep many of them secret. So I do hope that you enjoy what we're about to show you. It's a tradition that's not yet twenty years old, but one that your fellow students have reported to be among the more powerful of their time here. When I call your name, please walk through the door behind me. You will be instructed further there. And please let's do keep this one a surprise for our younger siblings, alright?

We muttered our assent, and Uncle Neville began calling names. Rose was the first of us to be called, followed by Scorpius, who seemed to take forever. When my turn came, I smiled at Uncle Neville and walked through, only to be presented with a full-length mirror. Not being one to pass up a chance to check my outfit, I began adjusting my collar and smoothing out my hair, before Professor Sinistra began to bark at me.

"For pity's sake, Potter. We know that your family told you about the Mirror of Erised, but you don't have to go parading around like that. Sure, I get it. You're the happiest man in the world and only see yourself. Bollocks. If you're not going to take it seriously, just head back to your common room."

This was not part of the plan. And not only wasn't it part of the plan, but I'd have come up with something much more clever had I known they were going to take us to the mirror. And besides all that – why was I looking at an image of myself? Certainly, being the son of Harry Potter had its advantages, but I was hardly the happiest person on earth.

I ran my hand through my hair and my knees buckled as I saw a lightning bolt shaped scar under my fringe. I looked at my tie to see that, yes, it was Gryffindor. I panicked.

"Well, fine. If you don't believe that I'm the happiest man in the world, it's your loss," I said, and walked out into the 7th floor corridor.

That evening, a very flustered Rose walked straight up to my seat in the Slytherin common room, grabbed my hand, and pulled me straight into the Dungeons corridor. She didn't say a word as she continued to lead me through the castle, up the stairs, and back into the Room of Requirement. The mirror was still there, and in front of it was a very transfixed Scorpius, one hand almost daring to reach into the mirror.

"Scorpius?" I asked. He didn't respond.

"Scorpius? Come on, mate, what is it? Can't be that bad, right?"

He still didn't respond, so I sat down next to him and put my arm around his shoulder. Rose joined me on the other side of him. His cheeks were streaked with tears, and his eyes were hollow.

"Why don't you tell me what you see?" I asked.

Scorpius took a deep breath, and exhaled. Rose rubbed circles into his back.

"Do you remember the Creevy photographs? Do you remember my father's? The one where he's just sitting there with his scarred forearm exposed? I have a framed copy of that photo, and I am erasing the dark mark on Father's forearm with a rubber, and hanging it over the mantel with the other family portraits, right next to one with Rose's family. That's daft, right? I mean, it was such a long time ago, and –"

Rose inhaled sharply, tears beginning to well in her eyes, too. I had a wry smile on my face as I pulled Scorpius's head over to me and kissed his forehead.

"I'd reckon you could do worse, you know," I told him. "But my father said you could go mad looking at that mirror all day, so perhaps we should just take you back to your common room. Think we could tear you away, cousin?"

Scorpius smiled, and wrapped the two of us into one of the tighter embraces we've ever shared, kissing the tops of both of our heads. It was a silent walk back to the Ravenclaw common room, with Rose and Scorpius holding hands, and my walking alongside.

I never did find out what Rose saw in the mirror.


End file.
